Various garments have been specially designed for promoting performance and recovery progress of athletes. For example, most performance enhancing garments are loaded up with exogenous weights to be worn by the athlete during the training session. Consequently, this stimulates the generation of body muscles in the athlete as a result of exerting additional force to cope with the exogenous weights. Many of the commercial products available in the market operate on this principle to enhance sport performance in athletes, as well as to promote general fitness for the active person.
United Kingdom Patent No. 2359497 discloses a progressive weighted exercise garment. The disclosure includes a garment panel, a weigh receiving module with pouches for receiving weighted members and securing means to fix the module onto the garment. The receiving module is preferably sewn onto the garment at a predetermined position to minimize possible injury to the wearer and the pouches within are compartments made of pleated sheets.
Exercise apparel with a weight packet is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,144,694. The disclosed apparel includes a structure for holding at least one weight packet, while the weight packets are plural rows and plural columns of weight members inside a cloth pouch.
Johnson further describes a weighted exercise garment in U.S. Pat. No. 5,553,322 wherein the garment is formed of a one piece resilient flexible material to be snugly fit onto the wearer. Preferably, the disclosed garment includes means for removably carrying weights to be attached onto the front and rear upper panels, as well as the thigh portion of the garment. Correspondingly, complementary releasable fasteners are located at the mentioned panels for mounting of the weights.
A non-exercise activity thermogenesis weight loss garment is disclosed in United States Patent Publication No. 2006/0172870. The garments are sleeves for distal limbs that contain predefined amounts of additional weight loads stitched onto them. By wearing the disclosed garment in daily activities, the garment is supposedly able to increase daily caloric expenditure by the wearer.
However, all the above mentioned devices share a common shortcoming, i.e., they lack the flexibility that allows wearers to customize themselves regarding the body parts to be loaded with the exogenous weights. In more specific terms, the above mentioned devices have predetermined locations fabricated on the garment to be loaded with the exogenous weights. A limitation of this can be, for example, athletes of a particular sport may need neuromuscular or physiological development in only specific parts of the body, pouches or attachment sites for securing the exogenous weights provided on the garment can be redundant if these sites were not in use. On the other hand, lack of attachment sites at certain locations may prohibit exogenous weights to be loaded for training purposes. Moreover, the mentioned devices focus mainly on weight load training solely, while ignoring the fact that protection to the body part is equally important, particularly in sports involving violent physical contact such as soccer or football. The sport performance promoting garment should also offer sufficient protection to the wearer (and preferably serve as an exoskeleton) while it is worn to enhance sports performance and/or general health and fitness.